By faith Moses’ parents hid him for three months after he was born, because they saw he was no ordinary child, and they were not afraid of the king’s edict.
Hebrews 11:23 (NIV)
What His Parents Saw
Four afternoons a week a man comes down to the shed to look after an engine that hasn’t moved under its own steam since 1974. He keeps it the way it would be if it were going somewhere, oiled and turned over for a route it doesn’t have. The shed is at the end of a line that quits a quarter mile past it. On Thursdays a girl of nineteen comes with him and he gives her the clipboard without a word about it. She works at the garden center. She has never once asked what any of the parts are called.
She reads him the numbers off the sheet, and he turns things over with his hands and writes nothing down.
Moses’ parents hid a newborn for three months because they saw he was no ordinary child. The king had put out an edict, and a hidden baby ran against it, and they weren’t afraid of that. Three months is a long time to keep a newborn quiet, and nothing in the account says the edict was ever lifted or that anyone came to help them.
Their reason was the child himself. Whatever they saw when they looked at him was enough to act on for three months, in a country where the order had already gone out against him. They were surer of him than they were of the king’s order, and three months of hiding a newborn came out of that.
The light comes off the rail and the shed goes the color it goes. She reads him the last of the numbers and puts the sheet under a wrench so it won’t go anywhere, and he works over the brass on the side that faces the wall. Their three months began with what they saw in him. What are you sure enough of to act on today?
A Prayer to Remember
Father, I have given more decisions to fear this year than I’d care to write down, and most of them looked reasonable at the time. Give me the seeing that Moses’ parents had, long enough and sure enough to act on. Whatever it costs is on the far side of what I can see from here, and you know that part already.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
